


Oratory

by Nika_Mikaela



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Author is Testy, Gen, I Don't Even Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 09:10:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14493642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nika_Mikaela/pseuds/Nika_Mikaela
Summary: Something of a monologue directed at Her Grace Duchess Satine Kryze.





	Oratory

**Author's Note:**

> In all actuality I don't know what this is, I just felt like poking at Satine because *really?*  
> No beta, no promises on the accuracy of the allegory.

_“Let me tell you a story, Duchess. After which you are, of course, free to call me a barbarian all you like.”_

 

The language of my people was called Gayl. We called our planet Madé, and we were the Mahk’Madé. The year my great-grandfather was born we were placed under a protectorate by a people whom we had never met before. Most of us just went about our lives, assuming it was the strangers being odd and that it would blow over. Except it didn’t. By the time my grandfather was a young man traders began refusing to deal with anyone who could not speak Basic. My great-grandfather, who had never relied on anyone except his own self to make his business deals, was forced to bring my grandfather along as translator, or hire an unreliable translator who would, invariably, cheat him in some way. Complaints were made to our clan chiefs, and when that failed, to the high chief, but nothing ever came of it. By the time my father was born it had been made obvious that the outsiders had installed their own puppet government, a governor who was subservient to their king. 

With their new power, fear and hatred became staples. Anything unique to the Mahk’Madé that had not been appropriated as a fashionable fad became outlawed, our culture smothered under the weight of their oppression. My father was whipped in school for speaking in Gayl by teachers who spouted off “facts” about the superiority of their “modern” agricultural techniques, when Great-Grandfather had grown crops more efficiently and in greater amounts using the same techniques his own great-grandfather developed. My father was whipped for pointing that out, too. And for coming in late after Sunrise Salutes with Grandfather, and leaving early on Harvest Days, praying to Madé before luncheon, anything that made him different from the outsider “colonist” children and the assimilated. By the time he was sixteen he’d forgotten all but a few words of Gayl and chose to assimilate fully. He cut all contact with his family, married a girl from his class and lived his life as though he had never been Mahk’Madé.

When I was twelve I made an attempt to contact my grandfather. I found him, and for four years I learned what little he could safely teach me through sporadic interactions both in-person and through letters. It wasn’t much. Years of hiding what he believed for fear of being arrested had taken it’s toll on his memory, (though he also said that Grandmother had been the one in charge of remembering most of it before she passed anyhow,) and he was forced to surreptitiously research what I had wanted to know most of the time. Unfortunately, he wasn’t circumspect enough. Grandfather was arrested for sedition and conspiracy to commit treason. He’d managed to hide our communication, so when the Royal Guard came around it was to confirm we were clear of suspicion, not take us in for questioning. Father was visibly relieved that his traditional family was finally gone, and it took all my skill to transmute my disgust into curiosity about the paternal grandfather he never spoke of. 

And so, I lost the only link I’d found to my culture. Father started getting concerned about my curiosity and sold me on a three-year indenture contract rather than attempt to curb it himself. Mother had suggested it first. I lost my home, my trust in the last of my blood and six months later when the announcement came down from on high that the outsiders had concluded their experiment and we were no longer necessary, I lost my planet to their firebombs.

 

_“Do you understand now Duchess, why I cannot like or trust you, and in truth would not even were I able?”_


End file.
